If you give some monkeys a slice of cucumber each, they are all pretty happy. Then you give one monkey a grape, and nobody is happy with their cucumber any more. They might even throw the slices back at the experimenter. He got a god damned grape this is bullshit I don’t want a cucumber anymore!

Nobody was in absolute terms worse off, but that doesn’t prevent the monkeys from being upset. And this isn’t unique to monkeys, I see this same behavior on display when I hear about billionaires. It’s not about what I have, they got a grape.


The tweet is here. What do you do about this? Of course, you can fire this woman, but what percent of people in American society feel the same way? How much of this can you tolerate and still have a functioning society?

What’s particularly absurd about the critique in the video is that it hasn’t been thought through very far. If that house and its friends stopped “ordering shit”, the company would stop making money and she wouldn’t have that job. There’s nothing preventing her from quitting today and getting the same outcome for herself.

But of course, that isn’t what it’s about, because then somebody else would be delivering the packages. You see, that house got a grape.


So how do we get through this? I’ll propose something, but it’s sort of horrible.

  1. Bring people to power based on this feeling. Let everyone indulge fully in their resentment. Kill the bourgeois. They got grapes, kill them all!

  2. Watch the situation not improve. Realize that this must be because there’s still counterrevolutionaries in the mix, still a few grapefuckers. Some billionaire is trying to hide his billions! Let the purge continue!

  3. And still, things are not improving. People are starving. The economy isn’t even tracked anymore. Things are bad. Millions are dead.

  4. The demoralization is complete. Starvation and real poverty are more powerful emotions than resentment. It was bad when people were getting grapes, but now there aren’t even cucumbers anymore. In the face of true poverty for all, the resentment fades.

  5. Society begins to heal. People are grateful to have food, they are grateful for what they have. Expectations are back in line with market value.

You have another way to fix this? Cause this is what seems to happen in history, and it takes a generation. The demoralization is just beginning.